The Sea Beast Takes a Lover

by Michael Andreasen

  First came the Kingfisher marching band in their plum uniforms and piped ivory hats, followed by the living remains of this war and that, followed by the fraternal brotherhoods, and the children’s choirs, and the women who made quilts for needy causes. And there were balloons. Every year Kit Kirby filled the big gorilla he used for advertising off Route 7 with helium and walked it down the road by its ties, and Edna Pequil had a nylon Santa that she inflated for no particular reason, except that preschoolers, with no regard whatsoever for the province of the holiday, went crazy when they saw it. Then came Mr. Ball, the haggard, phlegmy middle of a sandwich board that read “DISSOLUTION IS IMMINENT” on its front and on its back “NOTHING SO GROSSLY POWERFUL SHOULD BE.” Mute and mortally disheveled, he marched drone-like down the boulevard, and behind him, Andy followed.

  We hadn’t seen Andy in over a month. The firemen didn’t suffer trespassers, and more than once our curiosity had been met with the business end of a fire hose. Now here he was, marching just ahead of the fire engine, which had been washed and waxed to an electric shine. He looked taller, the flaming mantel of his shoulders wider and more wildly flammable, the blue fires of his eyes occasionally flashing a strong, stony white.

  Then the show began. Thunderous overhead booms that followed a little too late behind spherical bursts of gold and green never living long enough to touch the ground. Children came armed with starlight crackling on sticks, sparks of hot gold feather falling to the concrete to disappear like melting snow. The Fourth was alive, grand and dazzling, and all looked heavenward to behold it.

  There was a gunfire pop closer to us. We scanned the crowd for the misfire, the joker who’d gotten reckless and possibly maimed, until our eyes fell on a chunk of flaming pitch lodged in the taillight of a nearby pickup. Both sound and stone had come from Andy.

  There was a fist-size hole in his chest, a place that had once been smooth glowing rock, now a tiny cavern. Then another report, this one like a car backfiring underwater, and something dripped from Andy’s hand, landing solidly on an iron manhole cover a few feet from where we stood.

  It was a small piece of burning Andy, but here, separate from him, it was still alive. The rock stood upright on little legs of fire, and sprouted little arms, and made itself a little head like a burning match. In seconds, it zipped down the street, skittering between the sidewalks and mortifying a nearby flock of pigeons into flight. Then came a popcorning of small explosions as more pieces burst from Andy’s bulk, or else dripped from the molten parts of him two or three at a time, each a hand of waving fingers landing on the ground with a sticky thud before springing up on tiny scalding feet. Andy’s chest was suddenly in full eruption, and what he erupted jumped and darted through a forest of legs and lawn chairs in search of tinder.

  Andy’s daughters ran wild, pollinating anything remotely flammable with plumes of fiery hair. Before anyone had sense enough to panic, the smaller shops around us began to burn, first from the outside, their quaint decorative shutters and eave-strung plastic flags catching all too quickly, then from within.

  What luck that the firefighters were there.

  Dressed in their best hats and coats, the rubber of their boots spotless, the polished nozzles of their hoses bright with the reflections of nascent fires, the firemen leapt from the railings of the truck. After months of battling Andy, they acted now as a single mind, one that sensed the fire all around it, not just in the walls and windows of the nearby buildings, but in the filaments of the street lamps, the stars in the sky, the sleeping hearts of the fireworks that had yet to be lit. Their hoses made great arms of water, dashing flames from the rooftops in strong, thorough swipes. Their ladders delivered them instantly to yelping survivors whom they plucked from windows like ripe fruit.

  We should have been running, screaming, searching for our mothers and then diving behind them, but there was no turning away from Andy. He was an artillery shell, each glowing part of him bursting out, breaking free, and leaving less of him behind. Left with little recourse, the firemen finally turned their biggest cannons and strongest hoses on what was left of him, beating him into the concrete with all the water on earth, every gallon, every drop, until the small fires of his eyes were finally lost in a great white nimbus of steam.

  When it was over, the firemen applied first aid to the wounded, looking as shaken as those they were aiding. Though they’d been successful and unquestionably efficient, their faces were blackened by more than soot, and wet with more than hose water. Prince Edward Street was a disaster that no one wanted to leave. The wet wrapped themselves in picnic blankets. The singed sought balm and sympathy. Mr. Ball, victorious at last, sat on the curb and sobbed.

  Adults moved from gaggle to gaggle, recounting what they had just witnessed as though their audience hadn’t also just witnessed it, describing wild, impossible events everyone knew to be true. Open fire hydrants had turned the street into a small river, and rats flooded out of their sewers swam its currents in search of higher ground, taking refuge atop bus stop benches, parked cars, and the monument of melted rock that had once been Andy, our friend and colleague, a cairn of stones now cold to the touch.

  Eventually the police started taking statements just so people would leave. Fireworks were still reporting from nearby skies, but were impossible to see under the dense canopy of smoke. After a few hours, its astonishment fully exhausted, the town wandered home.

  * * *

  —

  We managed to save one of Andy’s daughters for a short time.

  She hopped into the mason jar we’d been using to light inch-and-a-halfers. We carried her back to the tree house wrapped in a wet flag and poked air holes in the lid with a screwdriver. The next morning, we dropped in a habitat of twigs and leaves that she burned into a bedding of ash. We managed to keep her going for a few days on a diet of Kleenex and rolled newspaper, but anyone could see she was already starting to dim, and in our hearts, we knew she wouldn’t last long. Nothing kept in that way ever does.

  Jenny

  This is how Jenny eats:

  I chew her food, then put her esophageal tube to my lips and push the warm globs of mash into it with my tongue. Jenny forces them down using a series of complicated inhales that involve her entire body. Her neck-cap, which sits on her neck exactly where her head would begin if she had one, helps her regulate the flow of air, switching between esophagus and trachea to create brief periods of suction. Her chest expands and contracts under her silk blouse in punctuated bursts that jerk her shoulders back and forth. Her tear-cut diamond necklace, last month’s sweet sixteen present from Mother, bounces against her chest as she struggles with the food, the esophageal tube wet with plumbing sounds until the glob clears the neck-cap and peristalsis takes over. She always gets them down eventually. Learning to eat has been one of Jenny’s more significant accomplishments. She manages almost all of it on her own, except for the chewing.

  Thank you, she taps onto my palm. More please. Then she taps, Delicious!, even though there’s no way for her to taste any of it, which gives you an idea of her sense of humor.

  Jenny’s seat at the table is set with cutlery just like ours, all of which goes unused. No mouth ever touches her napkin. When I take bites for her, I take them from her plate, never from my own. When I first started helping Jenny eat, I would sometimes forget whose food I was chewing (it all tastes the same—she eats what we eat), and would swallow bites meant for her without thinking. It’s a hard thing to get used to, chewing food without swallowing it. I would try to make up for it by chewing a bite from my own plate and putting that in her tube, but Mother always noticed. It happens again tonight, even though it hasn’t in months, because I’m distracted. I’m thinking about the date I had with Joyce the night before, about how nice it was to eat next to a woman without chewing her food for her. I notice my mistake the same time Mother does. I don’t need reminding, but she reminds me.

 
“Jenny has her own food, Douglas,” she says like it’s the first time, “and you have yours.” As she says it, no part of her stirs. Her curled steam-white hair sits perfectly still. She holds her tone in check, her knife in midcut.

  Jenny can’t hear Mother, but can feel that the slight tremor of the table made by the cutting of food has stopped.

  What did she say? she taps on my knee under the table so Mother can’t see. I answer on her napkin-draped lap.

  I accidentally ate your food again.

  I don’t mind, Jenny taps. You can have some.

  She minds.

  Why?

  Who knows.

  What are we eating?

  Chicken Kiev and steamed asparagus over rice pilaf.

  What makes chicken Kiev different from regular chicken?

  There’s some kind of butter sauce in the middle.

  Is it good?

  It’s okay.

  Give me some chicken Kiev. Tell me when it’s coming.

  It’s coming, I tap, then press the bite I’ve been working on down into the tube.

  * * *

  —

  Ours wasn’t always a house of strict rules, but then Jenny came. She’s not the first person to be born without a head, but she’s the only one to have lived into her teens, and the cost of that survival, the constant vigilance required just to keep her alive through those first few years, changed all of us. Father’s change was that he died. Mother said it was heartbreak, but now I know there were also pills. Mother’s change was that she was never again a proud parent. Her daughter would never speak, never laugh, never be a great beauty. She would never beam with daughterly affection, or perform it in ways that others could look upon without cringing. Jenny’s private love would never make up for what she cost our mother in dignity, and because there was no way for Jenny to sense how much this hurt her, she never tried to hide it. Her spine never bent again. Endurance was all she had left.

  In those early days, we were told that Jenny could go at any time, that any small disturbance in care or routine might break the delicate spell of her being alive, so my change was that I became a boy who barely moved, barely spoke, would not take a breath unless it was safe to do so. And so we became a new family, the dead father, the decimated mother, the son who never breathed, and at our center, headless Jenny, who asked only that we care for her, protect her, and show her the world as we had come to know it.

  * * *

  —

  This is how Jenny sleeps:

  On her back, in a white cotton nightgown peppered with blue flecks, with a glass of water on her nightstand into which she can dip her esophageal tube if she wants and, in her own way, suck. If she needs help, there’s a button set into the wall next to her headboard she can press, and “The Bells of St. Mary’s” will ring throughout the house until one of us comes. On either side of the bed are two monolithic stereo speakers, each half as tall as me, with a subwoofer the size of a small toaster oven hidden under the comforter at her feet. The CD player’s carousel is stacked with old bass-heavy hip-hop and rap compilations. Artists don’t matter. When she wants a new one, I just go to the 99-cent rack at the Disc ’N Vid and pick the first album I find with the word “bass” in the title. Android Funk and the Third-Bass All-Stars, Return to Big Bass Country, The Bass That Ate Brooklyn 2: The Phat Bombs of August. They spin like ammunition inside the machine, waiting to fire off their hard, thumping rounds. I tuck her in between the pillars of black foam, making sure that her water glass is full and within reach, and with the treble set to 0 and the bass set to 9, I let the stereo loose. The speakers purr, and I can feel the hum of the subwoofer in my gut. The house thrums like a beehive. The walls take a soft but steady beating. Breakables millimeter their way across the shelves. It’s the only way Jenny can sleep without waking in the middle of the night. In Mother’s house of unnegotiable boundaries, where everyone takes responsibility for themselves and eats what’s in front of them, Jenny is allowed this gift of our indulgence. Ever since she was a little girl, this has been our family’s lullaby.

  * * *

  —

  When I was seventeen, Mother was restocking my dresser with balls of laundered socks when she found the Sears catalog lingerie section folded up under my shorts.

  Mother always addresses problems head-on. It’s how we’ve come this far.

  She called me into her sewing room, sat me down on the hassock, and set fire to the pages in an aluminum wastebasket right in front of me. We watched them burn like witches while Mother reiterated the importance of growing up to be a good, clear-minded man, and the shameful wrongness of associating bodies with pleasure. This, she explained, was the curse that came with the senses.

  I only half listened, trying instead to commit the pages to memory as they curled and smoked, to capture the contours of each supple curve and frank, open navel before it charred and disintegrated. Alone in my room, I can still conjure those bodies sometimes, the way their skin blushed at the touch of Mother’s lit match, the glow crawling over every inch of them, chewing at them in that way that fire twists and darkens but never fully erases.

  * * *

  —

  This is how Jenny and I walk to the pharmacy:

  Carefully, with poise and control, so that the difficulty of the task is never fully apparent to onlookers, which is everyone. Jenny walks tall in boots borrowed from Mother’s closet. She has every reason to. Below her neck-cap, she has the body and bearing of a self-assured, sophisticated young woman. Her outfit is conservative, but flattering. She has Mother’s strong spine. “Shame” isn’t a word we use around Jenny. We purposefully don’t have a tap for it. It’s a feeling Mother has excised from Jenny’s vocabulary and, thus, her experience. She doesn’t feel the city watching her without fear of retaliation. She has no idea how defenseless she is. On these trips, I’m meant to look out for her, to keep her out of trouble, but there’s no hiding our two bodies, our one head. Every living creature slows to stare. People shudder. Children can’t help themselves. Dogs are curious. There’s nothing I can do but receive every single stinging eye.

  We wander into the restoration of an old apartment building spilling out onto the sidewalk, stopping so Jenny can examine it, which she does whenever we encounter something unexpected on our usual route. Deviations from the norm fascinate her, and their investigation is something Mother encourages. I monitor as Jenny fondles traffic cones and follows yellow caution tape with her small, methodical hands. She runs her fingers along the scaffolding and struts, quietly mapping the bracing angles, the pleats of her skirt folding and unfolding in the wind tunnel of a covered walkway built to protect pedestrians from falling plaster and shards of lime. Her exploration is a slow, focused ritual. She leans and bends, gripping every pole, touching every bolt, stretching out our time away from home as much as she can. This world, overflowing with newness, is what she wants.

  What does this sign say?

  Ha-ha.

  What?

  It says watch your head.

  Ha-ha. That’s funny.

  We’re walking to the pharmacy to restock Jenny’s battery of medication, and to see Joyce, and to buy, if Jenny is good (Mother’s words, not mine), a new emery board, a new pair of clippers, and a new bottle of polish to feed Jenny’s fanatical preoccupation with her nails. She’s holding my hand in both of hers, tapping into it as we walk.

  Are you going to ask Joyce out again?

  I don’t know. Maybe.

  On a date?

  Maybe.

  How was your last date with her?

  I told you.

  Tell me again.

  It was pretty nice. We had dinner and played mini golf.

  And how was the date before that? Jenny makes it sound like this sort of thing happens all the time.

  It was pretty nice, too.

&nbs
p; And how was the date before that?

  There aren’t any before that. We’ve only had two dates.

  Ha-ha. I know. Did you kiss her?

  Not yet. You asked me that yesterday.

  Ha-ha. I know. Do you love her?

  Not yet, I don’t think.

  Where will you take her on your date?

  I don’t know.

  Out for chicken Kiev?

  Maybe.

  Delicious!

  The pharmacy isn’t busy, which is good. Joyce is behind the counter. She sees us coming and squints as she smiles, which I get the feeling she can’t help. She’s really something, though. Slim—there’s almost nothing to her—with orange curls that she keeps bundled up with pins and soft freckled skin. She does have these sort of puffy sacs under her eyes, and the squinting bunches them up and makes them kind of worse, but she’s got full, seriously great lips. I lead Jenny up to the counter and place her hands on the glass. Joyce and I do our hellos.

  Tell her I say hello.

  “It’s nice to see you today,” Joyce says to Jenny slowly, working her way around the vowels, and again I wonder if she really understands Jenny’s condition, or if she thinks that being headless is like being hard of hearing.

  Tell her I say hello.

  I tell Joyce that Jenny says hello.

  “Did you tell her that I said hello, too?” she asks. I tell her I did, and then I do, and Jenny taps hello again, and for a few moments we chat like this, politely out of sync. Then Jenny squeezes my hand and says she wants to go find some nail polish. It’s a few aisles into the store, but she’s made the walk plenty of times by herself, feeling her way along until her fingers locate the bottles, which she’ll work through slowly until she finds one with a shape and weight she likes. The color doesn’t matter. She doesn’t wear it for other people. I let her go.